Updates on the Oracle, Sun, and Java strife

By Alvin Alexander. Last updated: June 4, 2016

Summary: Sun's former CEO starts a Ruby/Postgres company. Larry Ellison (Oracle) slams Sun management. James Gosling slams Oracle.

Wow, there are all sorts of fun things going on in the Java (or former-Java) world. First, former Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz talks a lot about patents, including Sun's history with Microsoft, presumably because Oracle is suing Google over some Java patents that Sun would never sue for.

It turns out Mr. Schwartz is also starting a new company, and his primary technologies are ... Ruby and Postgres? Wow, the former guardian of Java and MySQL says "forget Java and MySQL"?

Think I'm making this up? Here's a tweet from Mr. Schwartz:

"Building PictureOfHealth.com on Ruby/PostgreSQL. Happy communities, simple licenses."

Bam!

Oracle's Larry Ellison blasts Sun management

Just a little while earlier, Oracle's Larry Ellison blasted Sun's former management team for their mis-management of Sun. Here's just one quote from that article:

"Their management made some very bad decisions that damaged their business and allowed us to buy them for a bargain price."

Ouch. But wait, there's more:

"The underlying engineering teams are so good, but the direction they got was so astonishingly bad that even they couldn't succeed," said Ellison. "Really great blogs do not take the place of great microprocessors. Great blogs do not replace great software. Lots and lots of blogs does not replace lots and lots of sales."

Pow!